Better late than never ...

If you happens to be following me on Twitter (and reading this blog? No way!) you probably already know that we have finally submitted our first iPhone application this past Saturday. Yup, that's right, the very same application I have been talking about since November! iTunes App Store here we come! ...

Contraction Tracker is, more or less, a basic contraction timer, designed to be used in the days/hours leading to the delivery of a baby. Nothing game changing here, sadly. But it's a start, and it was written mainly for our own use. Back in November, there was only an handful of similar applications on the store (2 to be precise). None were quite what we wanted, so making our own was most definitely a good idea (especially since it allowed us to get acquainted with the platform). Unfortunately, once the baby arrived, the time I could spare to work on the app dropped from 2-3 hours daily to a mere 30 minutes per days, on lucky days. That is the main reason why it took us soooo long to go from almost finished app (late November) to released app (early May). Sadly, today there is much more similar app available (10 including ours), so the competition is going to be fierce ... that's what you get for being slow to deliver! :-|

Now, of course, the submission euphoria is gone, and have been replaced by anxiety: How long will the review process take? Will we get (paid) customers? Have we left any embarrassing bugs behind? ... and of course the ultimate question faced by thousands of developers on a daily basis: Will we be rejected by Apple?

In case you are wondering, allo the application's icons were made for us by Alex Ventpap (alexventpap on Twitter) which we definitely recommend for iPhone artwork, among other things.

Release Candidate!

Yay! Finally! [Redacted] is officially in its "Release Candidate" form. Man, this has been a long road ... I'm planning to do a Postmortem post here once it is on the App Store. The plan is to submit it this coming week-end, for review. If everything check out and that Apple respect it's advertised delays, the app should be for sale within 7 days. Since it's a relatively simple application, which does not walk on the borderline of the SDK agreement, I'm hoping the acceptance will be swift ... but then again who knows what's going on within the wall of the App Store review office(s).

Tomorrow is the Vancouver iPhone Developers meetup downtown. I'm looking forward to it. I'm a bit nervous though. I haven't been to any developer oriented event for years! The last one I attended was a BeOS meeting in Paris back in 2000 (or was it 2001?) ...

Clueless predictions

Unsurprisingly, all my predictions from yesterday turned out to be just a wishes list. Turns out, I had in mind 3.0 to be matching the Pre offering ... but it just wasn't the case. Either Apple can't, or more likely they just don't care, meaning they don't see Palm as the mobile version of the anti-Christ. As eloquently put in this article, Apple's fixation on avoiding background processes, is causing us, the users, some usabilities PITA.

Anyway, I still think we will see some application switching support in OS 3.0 .... but only on the new version of the iPhone, rumored for this summer. As often, Steve Jobs will casually announce it with some smug comments about some power (but clueless) users wanting it very bad, so here it is but we don't like it much ... (e.g MacBook Pro 17" with mate display option).

Mandatory predictions

With now less than two hours to go before the iPhone OS 3.0 event, I think it is time for me to join the geek creed and make a couple of (clueless) predictions. Still I don't have John Gruber's writing style, nor insight, I'll keep these shorts and to the point.

So what to expect? Well since there is now a real challenger to the iPhone (that'll be the Palm Pre), Apple has to play catch-up and show that 3.0 will have all the goodies (and more, hopefully) than the Pre. Sounds pretty obvious isn' it? Well yeah it is. CNNMoney has a little write-up of the details of what to expect, here.

So then, what is/are my prediction(s)? Well here they are:

• The multitasking (don't really like to use that term, 'cause technically the iPhone OS is already multitasking) will not be available unless you are using the new iPhone to come out in June (or it will be available on older HW, but with a limitation of said 2 users launched applications and you will have to enable it via some hidden setting). The reason for this isn't much about hardware limitation, but giving you reason to upgrade to the new iPhone, which will come with a faster CPU/GPU (just stating the obvious here) and 256Mb of RAM (instead of 128Mb currently).
• Background application will be supported, but wont be based on UIApplication (let's call it UITask) and will have limitations on what they can do.
  
• The OS will allow applications to exchange data (by using files in a common area and/or IPC
  
• The new SDK will support building app with web technologies (a la Mojo)

Wishes list or predictions? Only 90 minutes to go before we found out!

Tweeting!

@All I finally succumbed to the Twitter temptation and created an account for myself (please follow me! ... please, pretty please?). Originaly, my motivation for doing so, was to follow some of the blog authors I read and some of the Cocoa/iPhone world celebrities (e.g Wil Shipley), but then I caught the tweeting bug and I have been tweeting (mostly non-sense and everyday stuff) furiously.

So what can you expect from following me? Pretty much the same kind of stuff that I blog about here: Cocoa, iPhone, Space, (weird) Music, books etc ... but in a more condenced form (for obvious reasons).

Time fly

Well, March has arrived, and I'm back at (my day) work (since yesterday). Our iPhone app is not yet finished (hard to believe I know ... and yet here we are), so the month have gone without any submission to the app store, contrary to what we were hoping for. Maybe in a couple of weeks? Two things have colluded to cause this schedule slip: feature creep and usability concerns. Concerns is maybe a bit too strong of a word, really. Let said that the UI wasn't as good as it could be.

Late CodeSigning

Just for fun, I decided last night after 9:30PM to install the latest WIP of our iPhone app on my wife's 2G iPod touch. In order to that, I first tried to modify the provisioning profile so to include the new device in it, but that didn't work too well. Even after having removed completely (or so I though) the said profile from her device and mine (and from the IDE's organizer) and created a new one (following the how-to instructions from the SDK developer portal), I could still not recompile the application. The error reported (in red, mind you) by Xcode being:

CodeSign error: a valid provisioning profile is required for product type 'Application' in SDK 'Device - iPhone OS 2.2'

By then, since it was well after 10pm, way past the baby bed time (and ours ...) , I had to close shop for the night. Problem is that closing the lid of the laptop doesn't mean one's mind isn't going to keep thinking about the problem ... well into the wee hours of the night. Hopefully, when I woke-up this morning (I'm gonna need a nap this afternoon!), I had an idea: Maybe, somewhere inside the project files, references to the old profile were still present? This turned out to be a correct theory (!), for when I grep-ed the project.pbxproj file for PROVISIONING_PROFILE, I found some references to the old profile. A simple copy&paste (BTW I use Smultron for such text editing tasks) of the profile identifier fixed the issue and shortly after, Susan's iPod was running our app :-)